Duanju on mobile: an individual experience, heir to the Walkman
- Feb 16
- 2 min read
With the Walkman, music left the living room, the hi-fi system, and shared listening, to enter the rhythm of movement. It became part of the body. Headphones on, you no longer "put on" music: you wear it.
Shuhei Hosokawa, a Japanese researcher and theorist of musical cultures, described in the early 1980s this individualized listening zone which partially cuts off auditory contact with the outside and transforms the street into a scenery to be passed through, rather than a space to be lived collectively.
Michael Bull, a British sociologist specializing in the use of sound technologies (from the Walkman to the iPod), has shown how these devices allow users to create scenarios for their daily lives, producing a carefully chosen soundtrack that restructures their experience of the city. The smartphone extends this scenario-making to images: we no longer simply overlay music onto our day, but rather overlay faces, scenes, and tensions onto moments that were once "empty."
Fiction is undergoing the same transformation, but through images. The smartphone is not just a new screen: it's a portable stage, a personal booth, a prosthesis for attention. The common thread is not the technology itself, but mobile privatization: access to a work becomes personal, instantaneous, chosen on the fly, consumed within a moving bubble.
On the subway, on a bench, in a queue, you can watch a fictional story without creating a "TV moment." You start a stream, then pause it. You resume. You pause again. The experience fragments, but doesn't disappear: it reconfigures itself around the gaps. Extended time is no longer imposed as a single viewing session; it is recomposed through micro-accumulation.
This shift is also reflected in attention figures. In the United Kingdom, a survey reported by The Guardian indicated that by 2025 time spent on mobile devices will have surpassed time spent watching television, with mobile use being more constant throughout the day, more spread out, and closer to the body.
Historically, music didn't disappear from the collective because of the Walkman; it redefined its spaces of sharing. The concert wasn't killed; it changed in value, function, and desire. Fiction could follow a similar trajectory: the personal screen doesn't abolish the shared screen, but it establishes an autonomous, intimate, mobile practice that coexists with other forms of viewing.
The real change is not just the format. It's also the way the public carries the work, triggers it, cuts it, resumes it, and lets it coexist with the world.
Article written by Guillaume Sanjorge
Sources:
• Cambridge Core – January 1984
• Taylor & Francis eBooks – September 23, 2019
• The Guardian – June 25, 2025
• ResearchGate – April 27, 2018
• SpringerLink – 2006
